Thank you, Uncle Giraud. Dear Uncle Giraud. You could so easily have done it to Rafael and all his kind, and the labs are still producing them. You’d do that for Denys, to be sure he got information he wouldn’t know how to chase. You’d do anything for Denys. You set it up so Denys would get his information even if you weren’t there. And the BR‑28s are just the set I know about.

I know one thing, at least. You laid traps you neglected to tell me about. Denys was still alive, and you wouldn’t betray him. I understand that. And I understand Denys was protecting me. But you ended up putting me in danger to give Denys that little advantage in keeping power, because youdidn’t tell me there was anything like this buried in ReseuneSec.

And that makes me just a little mad, Uncle Giraud.

So now I know what you did, and what your mindset is capable of in your next incarnation, toward my successor…all sorts of betrayal, for the one you’re protecting. And I see very well how your own mindset arrived at the notion of this compulsion to report. You made it your own mirror. You so liked information. You never trusted any of your own subordinates. I’ll bet you even planted one on Hicks. On your own second‑in‑command. I’ll bet if I went over his beta assistants, I’d find one with a block very much like that. I bet you did some very special work on that one other azi. And ten of the BR‑28’s?

Oh, that was wicked, Uncle.

But now I do know.

And solving Rafael’s problem, I know what to do about you.

Denys doesn’t need, to be born. Just you do. Just you, to be fixed, on me, Uncle, the way you fixed on Denys.

Denys has just become irrelevant.

Good. That makes me happier. I’m sorry about it, simultaneously, and I wish I didn’t have to, but I think we’re both going to be happier in the long run.

She prepared a letter to Yanni–just in case Yanni had gotten wind of her activity with her new, Hicks‑provided staff. Yanni might be guilty as sin in the first Ari’s death–at least in the cover‑up and blaming Jordan part of it. Yanni might know exactlywhat Giraud had been up to, infiltrating ReseuneSec, ReseuneSpace at Fargone and Beta–and if he did know, and he’d been letting that happen, and not telling her, he was on the verge of becoming irrelevant, too.

Dear Uncle Yanni,she wrote, with a little pain in her heart.

I turned up something. And fixed it, so you know. I think you should be aware. I leave it to you whether to tell Director Hicks his own staff may have a problem. Be discreet. You know what your lines of honest communication are.

Then the stinger:

Please include me in them from now on.

BOOK THREE Section 2 Chapter i

JUNE 11, 2424

2158H

Giraud’s eyes had been changing position slowly. By this seventeenth week they had moved all the way onto the front of his face, so he was much more Giraud than he’d ever been.

He’d gained weight–hadn’t kept up with Abban in size, but was about the same as Seely. He not only twitched to stimuli this week, his bones had begun to harden out of the tough cartilage that earlier comprised his skeleton, and his joints, responding to muscle twitches, had begun to flex and move in a way they would do for the rest of his life.

He’d also gained a new sense: he had actually heard the maternal heartbeat that had timed his life…he heard it when a tech dropped a pan: he couldn’t tell it was different than taste or smell–every stimulus was the same to him, but he reacted, the way a plant might react. His newly functioning joints moved.

His sense of hearing would grow more acute as time passed, but Seely’s would be extraordinary, an asset, in Seely’s future profession.

And something else had changed, radically so, for Giraud. He was solo now. His brother Denys’ sequence number had been active in the birthlab computer until just last week, a soft scheduling that would have let it go to implementation on any given day. That data and that material had gone back to deep storage, the CIT number dumped from lab files, officially disconnected from Giraud’s, so even if he looked, someday, he might find it hard to find his brother until his Base was significantly higher than the lab’s.

Denys might yet be born. There was seven years yet to change that back without deviating from program…seven years had been the gap between the brothers. But for now that data had quietly slipped deep into storage, with no extant string to pull it out. That would have to be rebuilt.

A subsequent generation might change its mind about connecting Denys to Giraud, having both of that set.

This one wasn’t likely to.

BOOK THREE Section 2 Chapter ii

JUNE 11, 2424

2158H

Living next door to Ari had its moments–one of them being about suppertime, when the hall suddenly flooded with ReseuneSec in uniform, and Justin’s plans for dinner out had taken second place to ingrained apprehension. Their door had stayed shut. The mass of black uniforms had, instead, been admitted to young Ari’s apartment, all of them at once.

Well, Justin said to himself, that was unnerving. Thirty was the number of Ari’s own detail, if the records he’d passed on had been all‑inclusive. Had that been thirty? It could be.

And were they safe, for God’s sake? Ari had yanked the initiative back from him, unfinished, said it was all right, he and Grant had been right–

Right? There’d been some sort of problem. He knew there was. Grant agreed. And she went ahead anyway.

“She must have done something,” Justin commented to Grant, who stood at his shoulder to see the minder’s vid image. “She wouldn’t have them all in there, if she hadn’t. Damn, I still can’t find the glitch, and hell if I want to ask her–she’s confident enough, as is.”

The message she’d sent, taking the project back, still rankled. He’d lost sleep on that work. Lost a major amount of sleep. And he still didn’t have an answer, or a real thank you. There had been times, in the last few weeks, when he actually understood his father’s feud with the original.

Grant’s hand landed on his shoulder. “Doesn’t look like a good evening for us to go out,” Grant said.

He ran a capture on the security monitor’s immediate record. “Entertainment,” he said. And dinner out became dinner in.

They popped pizza into the luxury apartment’s very fast oven, and opened a respectable wine while they reviewed the tape… Yes, there were thirty. Thirty who presumably were about to be received and probably instructed inside Ari’s fairly capacious living area…after which they would presumably pour back out into the hall, ready to go on duty.

It was damned certain the thirty, plus the recently acquired domestic staff, weren’t by any means going to fit in that apartment’s staff quarters. So they had to be living somewhere else in the wing, likely downstairs.

“That’s the BR‑283,” Justin said, regarding the tall one with the officer’s silver on his collar. “Classic officer set. Dates from the 2370s. Spooky, how much like Regis he looks.”

“Not spooky,” Grant said with a little laugh. “It would be spooky if he didn’t.”

“I wonder whatever happened to Regis.”

“No knowing,” Grant said. The laugh had immediately vanished.

Dark thoughts. A dark time, a time worth forgetting. The crowd in the hall represented a new age. A new beginning. Regis had vanished, along with the rest of the first Ari’s staff. No one ever saw them again. Rumor had it her Florian and her Catlin had been terminated. No one knew how many others.

Cheerfulness, for God’s sake. The little minx had probably fixed whatever glitch there was in the BR set. Figure howshe’d fixed it inside several weeks of working the problem…that was a question.